With the general elections closing in, attention is being brought to the influence of social media on voting within the UK.
It has been suggested that Facebook and Google should temporarily ban political ads until citizens have been allowed to vote. A group of researchers, technologists, digital rights defenders and internet users from Mozilla, Doteveryone, the Open Data Institute and Sheffield University wrote to the chief executives of Facebook and Google, Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, highlighting the concern of political advertising.
It is noted that the UK Electoral Commission, Information Commissioner and the cross-party DCMS Select Committee – alongside Facebook – are calling for urgent legislative action to address the issue of political ads. However, with the election on the 12th December, there is no time for new regulations to be put in place.
In October, it was found that Facebook had rescinded a policy banning false claims in advertising. Thus leaving political adverts open in regards to how they could potentially mislead or deceive the public. Twitter recently announced that it will ban all political advertising, coming into effect on November, 22nd – in time for the UK elections. This will be applied to all electioneering ads, as well as ads related to political issues. Twitter’s announcement adds pressure to other social media platforms, particularly Facebook, to change their current stance.
Twitter and Facebook both permit the use of sensitive user information to be gathered by political parties to target users using specific criteria such as their political leanings, further adding to the question of the release and use of personal information online. Recently, Google announced a worldwide ban on this form of targeting in political adverts.
There has been no response as yet from Facebook. Interestingly, last week Facebook posts with the word ‘vote’ were blocked, however, it was subsequently reported that this was a mistake. A spokesperson for Facebook said it was likely due to a “bug”. Alex Krasodomski-Jones, director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media – a joint research venture of the University of Sussex and Demos – stated “Whether bug or policy experiment, sudden changes to platforms can have disproportionate effects on their users. Platforms are under huge pressure to do more towards electoral integrity, but moments like this should remind us of the real crisis in legitimacy and oversight we still need to resolve.”
It is important to note that both Facebook and Twitter are US companies, and therefore regardless of the ethical, moral and social implications of the services they provide and how they supply these, they are free to do whatever they want under the current laws in the territories in which they operate, plus their own Terms and Conditions, which they can indeed alter themselves. This is why there is such a focus on users making their own decisions as to what platforms and services they make use of, and understanding what is going on behind the scenes when they do so. Social media networks are of course not nationalised or government run; they are private enterprises.